Rhetoric of the Image

W 2:00 – 5:00 PM, Dwinelle 7415

What is art? What is science? And are distinctions—whether imagined, philosophical, historical, or practical—between the two critical to any productive conception of them? This course probes literature from and about both art and science in order interrogate this operative distinction, in turn questioning how both histories and practices of "art" and “science” implicitly or explicitly stake out their limits. To do so, we examine a vocabulary that has forced itself into the texts of art and science—Life, Self, Future, Universal, Vision, Globes, Genius, Ugliness, Shock, and Big. We examine such "formations of meaning" across space and time, and across domains of practice. We look to the play of these terms in artistic and scientific discourse and practice in order to gain a sense of how the relationship between art and science has been imagined and enacted.